The Virtue of "Lying": Recovering the "Saving Beauty" of Plato's Poetic Vision

God made the angels to show him splendor—as he made animals for innocence and plants for their simplicity. But Man he made to serve him wittily, in the tangle of his mind!¹

I. Introduction

"Many are the wonders, none is more wonderful than what is man," says the chorus in Sophocles' play Antigone. "He has a way against everything, and he faces nothing that is to come without contrivance [technas]. Only against death can he call on no means of escape."² This claim is not anthropocentric. To the contrary, it points to the distinctive pathos of the human condition. Man is a methorion, or bridge, between the material and immaterial orders, a hylomorphic composite of body and soul, grounded in the necessities and contingencies of time and history yet radically ordered toward a transcendence he cannot fully achieve by his own efforts. As bridge between these orders of being, it is both his fate and vocation to live by "contrivance" (technas), a word better translated as "art." Thus, man's nature as animal rationale (rational animal) and animal faber (making animal) are indissolubly bound together in what Walker Percy terms Homo symbolificus, "man the symbol monger."³

Human speech is emblematic of this reality, for it is through this "art" that we strive to discover and express transcendence, and yet speech itself is a mimetic artifact, a "contrivance," an "earthen vessel" that reflects but can never exhaust the reality it seeks to represent.⁴ And so our entire lives are spent seeking for that definitive and sufficient "word" that will bring us the intimate communion we desire with God, with ourselves, and with others. As we journey toward that consummate end in the Word, we must live by imperfect words in an imperfect world.

What is the proper Christian response to this condition? Or, to be more precise, what is the proper function of art in a complete human life? What are its proper uses and its moral limits? These questions have been the subject of considerable discussion and disagreement within the Christian tradition, and they are the subject of the following article.

In treating this subject, I have chosen an interpretation of Plato's Republic as my point of departure.⁵ As such, my treatment will be more discursive than analytic. I have chosen this strategy for two reasons: First, because this dialogue offers a remarkable and illuminating treatment of the human condition as it relates to language and art. Second, because this dialogue has had an immeasurable influence on the development of Christianity and Western thought generally. In short, I hold that the enduring value of Plato's Republic rests not so much in the ossified metaphysical "Platonisms" and mystical "Neo-Platonisms" that succeeded it, as in its penetrating analysis of the nature and limits of human reason. A recovery of this analysis could not be timelier for the contemporary Church as it struggles to navigate its way between the twin perils of modern rationalism and postmodern subjectivism.

In what follows I will give a brief outline of the main elements in Plato's treatment of art and language through an exegesis of Plato's Republic. Next I will show how these elements were carried over and incorporated into traditional Christian thought. Finally, I will show how this framework is useful for making sense of the particular struggles the Church faces in the modern world, as well as the direction she must take along her journey.

II. Lying in Plato's Republic

In a short, witty dialogue titled "The Decay of Lying" Oscar Wilde's protagonist Vivian makes the following claim: "Lying and poetry are arts—arts, as Plato saw, not unconnected with each other—and they require the most careful study, the most disinterested devotion."⁶ Despite the otherwise overblown Romanticism of the dialogue, Vivian here hits upon a fundamental insight that seems to have eluded many scholars on Plato. At the end of Book Two of Plato's Republic Socrates engages in a discussion of lying in which he distinguishes between...